By Jeffrey R. Kosnett
From Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
When a stock sector crushes the S&P 500 index by 15 percentage points over a full year, it’s normally cause for euphoria. But utilities, which are both regulated and sensitive to interest rates, are not your typical industry. And that massive 15-point outperformance translates to just a 1.5 percent total return over the past 12 months.
Now the category confronts several perils. If you are a longtime utility investor, there’s no urgency to quit, particularly if you enjoy a fine dividend yield on the original or average cost. The group’s 10-year annualized total return of 11 percent is excellent. But the bright lights are flickering….